Talk about adding insult to injury.
After a deadly winter storm left millions in Texas without power this week – along with food and drinking water shortages – some Texans are now seeing exorbitant electricity bills.
The guides reach US $ 17,000, according to reports.
That’s how much Ty Williams, an Arlington resident, told FOX 4 of Dallas-Fort Worth that his family was being asked to pay – despite trying to save electricity during the storm.
“How can anyone afford it? I mean, you get out of a few hundred dollars a month,” he told WFAA-TV in Dallas. “There’s no way, it doesn’t make sense.”
Williams is a customer of Griddy, a state-owned wholesale electricity supplier.
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Griddy asked its customers to switch this week, as wholesale prices soared during the storm, but Williams said it took several days for him to sign up for a new company.
“It was useless because nobody wants to take on the burden of a new customer when they are paying dearly for the energy,” he told FOX 4.
Some customers said they received messages or bills from power companies, charging when they were in the dark, but the companies said that no customers will be charged when they have no electricity, FOX 4 reported.
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Griddy said in a statement on his website on Thursday: “We know that you are angry and so are we. P —–, actually.” The company explained that wholesale prices soared because the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUCT) took control of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s power grid, on Monday and raised the wholesale price to $ 9 per kilowatt hour until the grid could handle the demand caused by the winter storm.
The company said this is about 300 times higher than the normal wholesale price and, while 99% of households had electricity on Thursday night, PUCT left the price in place.
“The market must set prices, not political ones,” said the company. “We intend to fight for that and alongside our customers for equity and accountability – to reveal why such price increases could happen when millions of Texans ran out of energy.”
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Griddy told FOX 4 that high bill payments can be made in installments.
Another client in Dallas told WFAA-TV that they kept his 700 square foot apartment at 60 degrees this week, but his bill was over $ 1,000 and a separate Griddy client told the station that his home account was 1,300 square feet was $ 3,800.
“I paid just $ 1,200 for the entire year 2020,” said the customer.
Price increases affected only customers with variable or indexed rate plans, not those with a fixed rate.